I was a goddess in sixth grade. It was glorious: full of cheerleader-captaining and going with boys during gift-giving holidays and leading my group of friends in ganging up on other friends and Safety-Patrolling and playing Barbies with my sister.
As sixth grade was the final grade in my primary years, I was at the top of the heap, not the bottom of the middle-school barrel. Yes, I had glasses, but I was still co-captain of the Cowboys Cheerleaders (Blue and white, dy-no-mite!). I may have been the smartest (or second-smartest) kid in my class of 30, but I was still blonde and thin and funny. I may have been one of those girls who ranked her best friends and talked about some of them on the phone with some of my other best friends, but I got the most "Will you go with me?" notes, and more than one Jason and a Kevin gave me presents at one holiday or another. I had a highly developed sense of fashion (which seems extremely tragic now but was cutting-edge at the time) and clear skin.
Sixth grade was, not to rub it in to either Wicked M or G Love, awesome.
Pretty much all of elementary school was awesome for me. I loved my teachers for the most part and they all loved me, liked my friends (although I don't know any of them anymore except Kat, whom I have to know 'cause she's related to me), got in trouble just enough to feel like a bad-ass about once a year, got along with my parents, and didn't really worry about anything, even when I was a tween.
One unpleasant memory I have is of taking a field trip to the nearby junior-high for a pre-orientation of sorts where we had the chance to be talked at by the teachers of subjects in which we were interested (for me, Newspaper and French). Everything was rushed and serious and seemed like just a litany of really hard homework assignments. I remember feeling small and shy and dumb and younger than I usually felt. These thoughts of inadequacy should have foreshadowed my move to a new town/time zone/educational grouping--we moved just after sixth grade ended and I wound up entering middle school in the middle.
Please don't ever ask me about seventh or eighth grade [shudder]. That wonder would be much longer and less rosy.
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2 comments:
I think maybe I am starting to suss this out. Those of us that were in middle school in sixth grade were pretty miserable -- probably because we were at the bottom of the heap and were trying to figure things out. Those of us that were still in elementary school and were on the top of the heap had a pretty good experience.
I know that if I had chosen to write about fifth grade instead of sixth, my story would have been much different. Fifth grade was GLORIOUS!
I was just a miserable kid in public til age 16, I think. Too shy. Home life was great, but other people were terrifying. Then I moved somewhere and landed in the more popular crowd and spent my final 2 years of high school a lot happier.
We could do senior year of high school and I'd have a much happier story to tell! But I'm with Rin - 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade - - - they are messier stories.
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